and what my first year looked like at Nicholls State University.

Contributed by Elizabeth Batte, MLIS

Hello all, I am the Library Director at Ellender Memorial Library at Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, Louisiana. For the past year and a half, I have been the OER Coordinator on my campus working with open access initiatives locally, state-wide, and nationally. Here is what I did to make my first year as an OER Coordinator successful.

In September 2018, I accepted the position of Electronic Resources Librarian at Nicholls. My position as the OER Coordinator was in the job description, but not my main responsibility. To note: OER is what I was asked to do as a presentation for my interview. My previous experience was as a branch librarian at a public library, so I did not have any open access experience, but I had a lot of outreach experience that quickly became useful. There was a lot of time management put into place with this dual-role. However, I feel that these two roles work well together. Working with electronic resources was an advantage when shifting gears to OER because I was in a similar headspace. The goal as a librarian is the same for both; I am trying to get the best resources for the lowest prices with the most access for my students. 

Within my first month, I was introduced campus-wide as the OER Coordinator and named the chairperson for the newly created Textbook Affordability Taskforce. It seems obvious, but having the support and buy-in from campus administrators and a majority of department heads was a key component to my first year being successful. However, since textbook affordability was not a mandate, faculty at Nicholls State University still had to make the individual decision to go open.

My role in helping faculty go Open was three-fold. First, I worked with general education course professors and department heads on the Textbook Affordability Taskforce to create a 3-year textbook affordability plan. The task force decided that a 20 percent decrease in the cost of textbooks per student by course enrollment would be our goal starting with the Fall 2019 semester. The average cost spent on textbooks in the Fall 2018 was $137 so by Spring 2022 we hope to have that down to $110. Now that we had a goal, we had to create a plan to get to the finish line.

The easiest classes to target were the 101/102 level courses with high enrollment. Department heads could talk to the professors for those courses and work with them to adopt an open-access textbook for the Fall 2019 semester. Many of them went with OpenStax textbooks for the first semester and worked together to customize the texts for the Nicholls curriculum. The total savings for that first semester were over $200,000 thanks to OER adoptions. By the Fall of 2019, the overall cost for a textbook was also down, below the 20% goal, at $97. 

Next, I worked with our state library consortium, The Louisiana Library Network (commonly referred to as LOUIS), to host Open Textbook Network workshops on campus. In the workshops, I discussed the impact of expensive textbooks on students and how they navigate around those costs. We also had honest conversations about what the faculty can do to help students save money on textbooks and be mindful of the costs put on Nicholls students. We asked the faculty to read and review one textbook in their field of study at the end of the workshop. Their review and attendance at one of the workshops resulted in a $200 stipend. This workshop was part of the open textbook adoption process for PSYC 101.

The last initiative I put forth in my first year was to team up with another OER champion on campus. This professor created his own workbook for students to use throughout his course and knew the ins and outs of transforming his course from traditional to open. We worked together to host a professional development workshop on campus for all faculty. About 20 faculty members attended and all of them were engaged with the topic. I left the workshop with several business cards in hand and future meetings on my calendar. It was also another opportunity for faculty to get to know me as their go-to person for OER help.

If you are at a library that is looking to be more involved with OER initiatives on your campus, make it a team effort. I worked with our library’s Outreach Coordinator to tag along on their campus events and do social media takeovers. Any chance I had to be out of the physical library and meeting faculty face-to-face, I took it.

This is not what the first year for an OER Coordinator looks like for everyone. I came to a regional university at a time when they wanted to work towards more affordable textbook options. The administration gave me the tools I needed to succeed and I quickly built relationships with other OER advocates on campus. My advice to librarians moving into OER roles is to be as visible as possible on your campus. Always work on building relationships with faculty because a “no” this semester may turn into a “maybe” or better yet a “yes” next semester.

Lessons learned:

• Join the OER community. Be involved. You can go from novice to well-rounded with the right connections. Also, #OER Twitter has also proven to be a great resource!
• Don’t be scared of faculty. Yes, asking them to consider a “non-traditional” textbook can be a big task but there is no harm in starting the conversation.
• Build relationships with OER advocates on your campus. OER is often a grass-roots effort on campus and you need allies. 
• Even if your campus is not actively engaging with an open-access program look at what your state or region is doing. Being involved with these initiatives can help foster one locally.
• Last but not least, time management is crucial. Learn what works best for you and stay organized. (This is really just a great tip for any librarian.)

Elizabeth Batte (they/she) is the director of the Ellender Memorial Library and the Open Education Resource Coordinator for the Nicholls State University. They are an active member in library services within Louisiana, serving as president of Louisiana’s ARCL chapter, assistant editor for the ACRL-LA open access peer-reviewed journal CODEX, and columns editor for the Journal of Open Educational Resources in Higher Education.

This post is by Elizabeth Batte and is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, except where otherwise indicated. Please reference OER and Beyond and use this URL when attributing this work; for more information on licensing, see our Open Access Policy.